federation v0.15.0

This is mostly stuff that has been added while implementing federation compatibility for Socialhome. This release introduces the share entity and some other additions, changes and fixes, but most importantly introduces the id attribute in all entities, in preparation for introducing #ActivityPub support.

The next release will be backwards incompatible since I aim to drop the #Diasporahandle and guid attributes and use id everywhere as the "object ID". For Diaspora protocol it will be in the format of a Diaspora URI (which contains handle and guid). For ActivityPub it will be the URL of the object.

If you are using or plan to use or are just interested in maybe using this library, would be fun to know and that would make sure I take your use case into account ?

The Jabber network (a federated set of thousands of servers with many tens or hundreds thousands of users) is under a continuous flood of spam messages for multiple years. Similar to the open email relays of the mid-1990s, public (and often abandoned) XMPP servers are being abused to deliver those messages.

We, as the operators of public XMPP servers, commit to the following Server Policies to fight spam on our servers, and we announce our intent to block incoming communication from public servers that distribute spam messages and do not adhere to the Server Policies. Furthermore, we will inform other Public Server operators and the general public of domains sending spam and not reacting to abuse reports.

Server Policies

A Public Server is an XMPP server that allows both the registration of accounts by third parties (either via [In Band Registration][XEP-0077] or by other means, like a web form), and federation to other XMPP servers, making it possible for its users to reach out to other XMPP domains.

The operators of a Public Server shall perform the following actions to fight spam:

Schedule

With our signature under this Manifesto, we assure that our servers are already following the above stated Server Policies.

Starting with July 1st, 2018, we will start blocking incoming server connections from Public Servers not following the Server Policies above, if those are forwarding spam messages to our users. The blocking message will contain a reference to this Manifesto.

So, I just published a tiny little blog post with my thoughts on #ActivityPub, #ActivityStreams, and related specifications. If you manage to finish reading it, you should have a pretty good understanding on how I see the world of social networking protocols, and you will get an answer to the question if whether is likely for #diaspora to support ActivityPub any time soon or not.